


i love you more and more and will my whole life long

by eynn



Series: had a dream, you and me in the war of the end times [10]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Nobody Dies, Time Travel Fix-It, anakin kidnaps baby domino squad, and are very suspicious of it coming from authority figures, and obi-wan cannot stop trying to snuggle cody even though it's not his cody, but rex starts to figure it out in the end!, rex and cody don't know what affection is, vague mentions of past noncon, which makes this cody very stressed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:20:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27132385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eynn/pseuds/eynn
Summary: It seems like it takes hours to reach the doors.The General bangs on them, grinning cheerfully. He doesn’t seem to notice the way Rex flinches and looks around. When the brother inside demands to know their identities, he speaks with a tone almost like laughter.“I’m General Skywalker, and this is my Captain, and we’re here to see Domino Squad!”
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & CT-7567 | Rex, CT-27-5555 | Fives | ARC-5555 & Anakin Skywalker, CT-7567 | Rex & Anakin Skywalker
Series: had a dream, you and me in the war of the end times [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1713040
Comments: 51
Kudos: 793





	i love you more and more and will my whole life long

When they had turned around and headed back into Republic space, Rex had expected a certain sequence of events to happen.

First of all, they’d descend on Rishi in a blaze of blasterfire, capture – rescue – whoever was manning it, and then if the vod’e the General was looking for weren’t there, proceed to Kamino and invade that.

Second, they’d probably make it as far as the outpost before the panicking garrison would call for help, and then the other Generals would come running, and they’d all be captured.

Third, he’d probably be shot for treason along with the rest of his brothers, or if he was very lucky, just him and Cody would be shot because they could convince everyone that it was entirely their fault and his brothers would be spared. Probably to a short and horrible life, but spared for the moment.

Fourth, well, if event three didn’t happen, he would also have a short and horrible life on the front line of the next bloodbath, and die unnoticed and unremarked.

He had plans for that. He was prepared for it.

What actually happened threw him off, because none of it was anything he planned for.

General Skywalker had them split up, with two of the destroyers taking most of the vod’e, along with General Kenobi, Commander Tano, and the Senator and her shinies further away, into a area of space so full of debris and dust clouds that it was avoided by all but the most desperate spacefarers. He took only Torrent Company with him on the third destroyer, left that hidden on a nearby asteroid, and ordered them all to use the gunships to descend to the surface of Rishi, under cover of a meteor shower.

As he stands beside the man, helmet on so that nobody can see the confusion on his face, Rex wonders what had happened to his General to so fundamentally change his entire personality. The General Skywalker he knew was very much a ‘charge first before they do’ kind of leader, not a devious one.

He had also flipped from being distantly concerned but mostly indifferent towards Commander Tano to fussing over her like she was on her deathbed. The scene in the hanger as he had bundled her into a shuttle to stay with the others had disturbed all of them, especially when she had tried to shout her way into coming with him and he had burst into tears and hugged her for at least five minutes, refusing to let go.

He had handed her over to General Kenobi while she was still reeling from his outburst, who had pulled her into the shuttle and kept a hand clasped firmly around her upper arm as the doors closed behind them.

“Something wrong, Rex?”

“No, sir,” Rex answers automatically, jerking back to attention.

General Skywalker looks at him, a strange mix of sadness and affront passing over his face, before nodding and looking away again.

Rex doesn’t know where he went wrong.

Probably in not keeping up with him on Christophsis and letting him walk around that corner where everything had changed.

~

They arrive at the outpost without any trouble, and are ordered to stay in the gunships and keep an eye out, especially during meteor showers.

Every brother knows that Rishi is a dangerous place, so none of them show any inclination to disobey orders. Rex wishes that he could stay with them, but the General has ordered him to accompany him into the outpost.

The General is almost bouncing as they walk down the short road from the landing pad, but Rex can’t stop glancing from side to side as he half-runs to keep up. Inside his gloves, his hands are slippery with sweat.

What is the General going to do if the vod’e he is looking for aren’t there? What is he going to do if they are?

It seems like it takes hours to reach the doors.

The General bangs on them, grinning cheerfully. He doesn’t seem to notice the way Rex flinches and looks around. When the brother inside demands to know their identities, he speaks with a tone almost like laughter.

“I’m General Skywalker, and this is my Captain, and we’re here to see Domino Squad!”

After a long moment, the door slides open. Rex doesn’t know the brother on the other side, who hurriedly stands to attention as the General steps inside. “They arrived a tenday and a half ago, sir.”

“Great!”

As General Skywalker plunges into the base, Rex signs _don’t know, humor him_ and gives a tiny shrug before running after him.

He catches up to him in the command room, where a sergeant, hiding his nervousness very well, is calling for Domino Squad to come present themselves. The brothers on duty are watching the General as he wanders around the room with a half-deranged grin on his face, subtly inching their hands towards their blasters.

Rex takes advantage of a moment when his General’s back is turned and he is not facing a reflective surface to sign _not dangerous_ and _stand down_.

The sergeant asks _situation report?_

Rex glances at his General, sees that he’s distracted by something on a piece of flimsi, and signs _not dangerous_ more emphatically, then adds _possibly crazy_ and _follow his orders_. He thinks again, shivers slightly, and then adds _please_ , desperation making the gesture sharp and wider than normal, just before the General straightens up, head tilted as though he has heard something approaching.

Domino Squad files into the room and stands to attention, and Rex’s heart sinks. They’re shinies, not a color on their scrubbed-clean armor, and they’re scared.

“This is General Skywalker of the 501st,” the sergeant says, and salutes. The shinies scramble to follow his example.

They’ve never met a Jedi before, Rex thinks. They’ve never been off Kamino before. He comes to stand just behind his General and tries to be reassuring as he unobtrusively signs _no immediate danger_ and _please humor him_.

He can see by the tilt of their helmets at least one of them got the message, but unfortunately his General sees the twitch too and turns his head to look at him with a puzzled expression.

“Rex?”

“Sir?” he answers as blandly as he can.

The combination of the furtive signing and the tone set the shinies on edge even more, but there’s nothing he can do about it now.

General Skywalker studies him – or, rather, his helmet – for a few of the longest seconds of Rex’s life and then frowns slightly. “Are you all right, Rex?”

“I’m fine, sir.”

He gives him another look and turns back to the squad. “I’m Anakin Skywalker. Who are you?”

“CT-5555, sir,” says one of the squad after a moment of communal hesitation.

“What’s your name?” the General says, bouncing just so slightly on the balls of his feet. Rex frantically tries to think of what to say to the shinies, who are getting more and more tense by the second.

“Fives, sir.”

A smile like the sunrise appears on the General’s face. “And the rest of you? Names, not numbers.”

“Cutup,”

“Echo,”

“Hevy,”

“Droidbait,” are the answers, all with a slight mumble to them as they look at Rex for explanations he can’t give them. Then he winces as the General leaps forward and engulfs all of Domino, but primarily Fives and Echo, in a crushing hug.

“I’m so glad to meet you, I’m so happy to see you again, you have no idea,” his General says, before releasing them, though he keeps a hand on Fives’ and Echo’s shoulders. “You’re going to join the 501st. Uh, if you want to, that is, but I’d love to have you. Transports are here, all you have to do is pack your things!”

They all look at Rex.

 _Follow orders_ , he signs frantically.

“We’re – very honored, sir,” says Fives, who seems to be the spokesperson for the group. “We’ll just go get our things packed and be ready to move out in ten minutes, sir!”

“It’s all right, take your time, make sure you get everything and say your goodbyes,” the General calls after them as they rush back the way they’d come after getting a nod from the sergeant.

He turns the full force of the smile on the sergeant, who visibly melts under it. Rex feels a small mean jolt of satisfaction that he isn’t the only one General Skywalker can overpower like that.

“I’m so sorry to take your men without notice, but there are extenuating circumstances, Sergeant."

"Replacements can be here in a few days, sir,” the sergeant says. “I must have missed the memo assigning Domino to the 501st.”

“Oh, that’s all right. It was probably my fault.”

They wait in awkward silence.

~

Domino Squad falls in behind Rex, still on edge, as he follows his General back along the road to the landing pad and their gunship.

There is a rustle.

There is a rumble.

Then there is a creature coiling up and around and over them, all scales and eyes and teeth, and Rex brings up his blaster even as he knows it’s no use and all he can think is ‘ _this is why everyone hates this kriffing outpost_ ’.

And then the creature is rising into the air, away from them, wriggling and squirming as it hangs there helplessly, and the General is just standing there, hands outstretched and fingers splayed, calmly watching as the thousand-ton monster is caught in his effortless grip.

Rex sees the opportunity and shoots it as it opens its enormous mouth to snap.

General Skywalker lets the body fall to the ground and turns to him, smiling. “Thanks, Rex,” he says, and then honestly _giggles_. “We’d better get going, he might have had friends.” Then he focuses over Rex’s shoulder, where the shinies are looking understandably startled at the first use of Jedi powers they have seen, and his smile turns softer. “I promised to look after you. No one dies if I can help it.”

The trip back is silent. All the brothers are doing their best to be professional and not complain about an entire company and star destroyer being sent out to forcibly recruit five shinies barely graduated that no one even knows.

Quite literally barely graduated, Rex learns from a quick scan of their files. They’re the first squad ever to have had to take the graduation test twice, and also the only one to have been given permission to do it instead of just being demoted to maintenance or being decommissioned. A note attached to the files cite Jedi Master Shaak Ti as the one who insisted on giving them a second chance; perhaps she sent secret orders to General Skywalker to take them before anyone else could?

Their tiny rebel fleet is together again, hiding in a nebula some distance from Kamino but still within a quick hyperspace jump of it. Generals Kenobi and Skywalker are once again on the same ship, and Rex thinks that the two of them and the Senator are sharing quarters.

Odd, especially given the way that General Kenobi is stalking Cody, but useful for keeping them all in one easily accessible place, he admits. And the Senator’s shinies are adorable.

Rex gets Domino Squad settled in, with quiet whispers to the rest of his men to be careful with them, since they’re the General’s newest obsession, and retreats to his own quarters to show Cody the footage of the mission from his helmet cam.

Cody is already there, sitting on his bed. Rex locks the door and gives him an unimpressed look as he turns around.

Cody does have the grace to look nervous. “Sorry,” he begins, which isn’t a good sign. “Just. General Kenobi won’t stop . . . He apologizes every time but he keeps doing it and I can’t . . .”

“What’s he doing?”

“I can’t stay in my quarters. Every time I try to sleep he’s there within ten minutes, just getting through the door somehow and crawling into my bunk and . . . I can’t stop him, Rex. I don’t know what to do. If I can wake him up he always leaves but he’s really hard to wake and I don’t know how far I can go until he snaps and I –”

“You can’t say no,” Rex realizes with dull resignation. “None of us can.”

Cody nods, pulling his knees into his chest and wrapping his arms around them. “I do think he’s clever, and funny, and good at his job, and not unattractive, but I – I don’t want anything other than to work together without anger. I barely know him and I. I don’t think he’s like the officers that the Supreme Commander sent to get us ready for command but he’s from Coruscant, isn’t he? All the Jedi are. And they work for the Senate and they probably all talk about us and they know how to break us –”

Rex shoves him over to make him stop talking. He hates seeing his ori’vod’s eyes go far away as he curls in on himself to keep away the hands that are no longer there. It seems to work in that Cody comes back to the present, but he doesn’t stop talking.

“What if he comes when he’s not asleep and he doesn’t want to sleep? What do I do? What can I do without risking us? I can’t even ask for a transfer now, and Skywalker hunted down his . . . Domino from halfway across the galaxy and Kenobi just let him do it. He must think it’s all right to hunt us if we run away.”

“The Senator might help,” Rex says without much conviction. He’s watched his General and the Senator interact; they have each other equally held hostage by some strange kind of affection. And General Kenobi likes Senator Amidala as a person very much and trusts her judgement as a politician even more. She is the real holder of power they have to answer to now and she has two very powerful Jedi at her command.

That reminds him of the holo he has. He pulls it up and they watch it in silence. When they get to the part where the General holds up the Rishi eel-creature for Rex to shoot, Cody starts shaking all over again.

“How can we fight someone who can do that?” he whispers. “They don’t even have to move. He could just –” he waves a hand “—and he wouldn’t even need restraints or threats.”

“I’m sure neither of them would –” Rex begins uncertainly and then trails off. So far their Jedi’s insanity has manifested in a hatred of the Republic and an unnerving tendency to brother them, but it might turn into something darker at any moment, when they realize just how much power they have over them and how powerless the vod’e are to resist.

Cody shudders. “General Kenobi is making us renovate the sleeping quarters. I don’t know what he wants, but he won’t let us sleep in the bunk rooms anymore. And he’s working with us, lifting things and holding them up and . . . he can levitate an entire wall and give orders at the same time. It’s terrifying, Rex. And he keeps ordering me to put things down to buy for the ship and order everyone to buy other things with their pay and I don’t know what most of them are or how to even get the credits now that we’ve left the Republic and I know the Supreme Commander won’t authorize any of us actually handling credits anyway but General Kenobi won’t _listen_ and I don’t know what to do!”

“What’s he telling you to buy?”

“He says all of us need an individual datapad. Bedspreads? What even are they? And he wants to buy sofas and carpets. I don’t know where to look for them. I don’t even know what you do with them. I was thinking that maybe we could claim them from somewhere where people have them and thrown them away, like how the Guard got their barracks all furnished, but I don’t think we’re going to be making planetfall anywhere inhabited for a long time. He wants all of us to buy civilian uniforms and study a civilian assignment too.”

“That’s probably so we can go undercover.”

“But how would knowing how to play a musical instrument or grow a crop that isn’t for nutrition or have a strong opinion on a favorite holonovel or, or raise a tooka help us be undercover?”

Rex blinks. “A tooka?”

“Or a loth-cat. He said we could pick one or the other, but I had to buy at least one for each company.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know! I would try to research all the things he wants on the holonet but all the access points have been disabled so that we can’t be tracked. I even have half of a list of holonovel titles the ship needs to have, those would be easy to research.”

“Half a list?”

“In the middle of telling me a title he screamed ‘Kadavo’ and ran out of the room and I didn’t see him again until that night.”

“We could ask permission to turn one on temporarily –” Rex begins.

Cody shakes his head. “I already asked that, and he just. Looked at me. I don’t want to ask him for anything else for a while, Rex. I don’t . . . He’s always watching me and touching me and I just want to get away for a while.”

“If we stay together, it’ll probably keep them away while we’re not on duty.”

“Probably,” Cody echoes doubtfully.

“He’s not so bad when you’re on, is he?”

“Not – it’s different. He keeps looking at me like I’m the wrong person and I don’t know what he’s seeing or who he’s thinking I should be but I can’t be them and I don’t know how to tell him that without getting decommissioned.”

“You think he’d go that far?”

“For whoever he’s looking for?” Cody flinches. “He’d kill anyone and anything to get them back.”

“Maybe we should have turned them over to the Council when it first went wrong,” Rex breathes, close to his brother’s ear.

“Nothing we can do about it now. We’re stuck. The only thing we can do is keep them happy.”

“Not if it means you have to –”

Cody puts a hand loosely over his. “If it keeps us alive, I will. If it keeps him away from the others, I will. It’s all right, vod’ika. It’s what I was made for.” He laughs humorlessly. “It’s not like I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“It’s not fair.”

“Was it, ever?”

~

They get two hours of un-General-interrupted sleep, squashed together on the tiny bunk, when both of their comms go off.

It’s the medics, asking them to come and try to identify a brother that General Skywalker has just brought in.

When they get there, he is still half on the floor, dried blood caked so thickly onto every bit of skin they can see that he is indeed barely recognizable as a clone, let alone which particular clone he is. General Skywalker sits behind him, holding him up in his arms and helping the medics peel off the bloodsoaked bits of shattered armor and torn underclothes that are piling up around him.

They can’t tell what colors his armor was painted in, if it even was.

“Sir? Where did you find him?” Rex asks.

The General looks up at them with hollow eyes, and they are perplexed to see tears on his cheeks. “The Force brought him to me. I promised that if anyone needed me, I’d find them, and apparently . . . I don’t know where he’s from or anything. I felt the call, I answered, and he just landed in my arms. Some armor bits came after him, that might be important.”

“Where are they, sir?”

He nods vaguely at the floor. “All here, I just brought them along behind us. No helmet though, or it’s in too small of pieces to tell. And you don’t have to call me sir, Rex. Anakin is fine.”

Rex flinches minutely and then curses himself, because his helmet is off and the General can see his face. He isn’t even in armor, he realizes, just his sleeping blacks. This could turn bad very fast if the General looks up for long enough to notice. The frantic hand on his back tells him that Cody has just come to the same realization.

“I don’t know who he is yet, si – I don’t know who he is yet but I think he may be stationed on Coruscant?”

“Why?” The General is once again focused on the brother half-dead in his arms, and doesn’t look up at them again. He has one hand hovering above his heart, and Rex realizes by the way he’s moving his fingers that he’s doing something to his brother with the Force.

He squashes the impulse to knock the General over the head with the first thing he can grab and fling him away from his brother, does the man have no compassion left at all, can he not leave them with the dignity even as they’re dying? and does his best to keep the fear out of his voice as he lists his reasoning.

“The armor isn’t obviously showing any colors under the – the blood, which might mean that it’s either unpainted or painted in red, but he looks older than the usual shiny, so it’s probably red. And the. The extent and kind of injury are pretty average for someone who takes the blame for something wrong in the Guard, sir. Ana – General.”

The General’s whole body goes stiff, except for the hand over the brother’s heart. “Average?” he snarls, and Rex feels Cody flinch back behind him, the light grip on the back of his shirt turning almost turning into a chokehold before he can relax it enough to let Rex breathe.

“A lot of civilians’ lives rest on the excellent performance of the Coruscant Guard and any clone who fails in his duties must be punished appropriately,” he recites from the orders given by the Supreme Commander. He’s never had to take a rotation on Guard himself, but he was almost assigned there.

“Being tortured to death is never appropriate for anyone!” The General hisses. “Except for that rat bastard Sidious,” he adds, apparently to himself.

The brother’s eyes flutter. The General moves a little to let a medic cut away the last parts of armor that still cling to his torso and makes a wordless crooning sound.

Kix comes over, arms stained to the elbow with blood. He kneels by the General, heedless of the closeness of their bodies, and speaks to the barely conscious clone.

“I don’t know if you can hear me, vod, but I’m the medic for the 501st and you’re going into surgery. I have to knock you out now. It’s going to be fine, this isn’t decommissioning.”

The General nods. “Absolutely not,” he says, and there is a heaviness to his words that seems to hang in the air for a moment, leaving it charged like a nearby thunderstorm. “No one gets decommissioned on my watch.”

He helps Kix lift the brother and set him on a table for surgery, and then spins on his heel to leave, gathering Rex and Cody in his wake.

“Vod’e get tortured to death for being in the Coruscant Guard? How long has that been happening?” he says as soon as they’re outside.

Rex blinks. It’s an accepted part of being assigned there, since they are in the public eye and must not fail. He says as much and gets another snarl from the General, who then whirls around and punches the wall and begins to swear, starting in Basic and rapidly transitioning to a language Rex doesn’t know.

Behind him, Cody is having an anxiety attack.

General Skywalker stops mid-word suddenly, staring at Cody with wide blue eyes. He takes a tentative step closer, hands out and open where seconds before they had been angry fists.

“Cody?” he asks, voice a little raspy from shouting but suddenly soft. “Cody, are you all right?”

Cody manages to meet his eyes for a second before sinking to the floor and hiding his face in his knees.

“Oh shit, oh shit,” the General says with feeling. “I – Rex, does he do this often? How do you help – I need Obi-Wan.”

He’s gone before Rex can try to disagree.

“Up,” he orders, pulling Cody up with brute force. “Get up, he’s gone to get General Kenobi. We have to leave.”

They make it back to Rex’s room. Cody promptly takes cover under the bunk. Rex sits beside it, feeling helpless as he listens to his brother’s labored breathing.

Sometimes it feels like they had never left Kamino.

At least the General had seemed to be very against decommissioning, so Cody was probably not going to be decommissioned for disrespecting a superior officer by having an inappropriate reaction to a situation.

There is a knock at the door, and then General Skywalker calls.

“Rex? Are you there? Are you all right?”

Rex gets up and opens the door, hating himself for every movement, but knowing that he can’t refuse the Generals entry. “Yes, sir.”

General Kenobi is behind General Skywalker, a strange look on his face. His eyes are wide and dart around the room before fixing on the dark space under Rex’s bunk. “Is he under your bed, Rex?”

“Yes sir.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” he asks, half lifting a hand and then stopping, awkwardly twisting them together and then tucking them into the sleeves of his robes.

Rex can only blink at him.

Cody rolls out from under the bed, having pulled himself together enough to stand. He sways as he gets to his feet and before Rex can do anything, General Kenobi is across the small space, catching Cody under the arms and steadying him, waiting until he is still before removing one of his hands and reaching up to cradle his cheek instead.

Cody freezes, but for once Rex isn’t focused on his brother; he’s sidled around to look at General Kenobi and what he sees in the man’s expression fills him with a vague sense of wrong.

It’s only later, after the Generals have dragged Cody away from him to go the medbay and left him alone to cram into a corner of his bunk and feel helpless to keep any of his brothers safe, that Rex realizes why he felt disturbed at the look on General Kenobi’s face.

 _He looks at us like we’re people, not resources,_ he thinks. _He sees us. We’re a someone to him, not a something. He was worried about_ Cody _. Not about a commander or a target or a bedwarmer. About a person._

Rex relaxes enough to fall asleep again, wondering how to explain his sudden burst of intuition to the rest of the vod’e.

Maybe they aren’t as badly off as they feared.

**Author's Note:**

> ok so i was thinking, sidious seems to like hurting people for no reason, and he'd be especially smug about treating the clones worse than dirt knowing they can't tell the jedi about it. so he'd have some pretty awful people in the ranks who aren't jedi (*cough* tarkin) and i imagine that clones who weren't lucky enough to get a jedi commanding officer had pretty bad lives. and since this is set in the beginning of the clone wars, rex and cody have only had experience with abusive sidious-approved commanding officers.
> 
> that's why they're both floundering so much with anakin and obi-wan suddenly being much more friendly and affectionate than they were before time traveling back. they're used to orders and distance and nothing good coming from a superior officer who 'just wants to come in to have a chat'.
> 
> plus, like, in canon, the coruscant guard clearly shows signs of being afraid of the jedi. of course they'd be, if sidious was using them for stress relief and dark side experiments.


End file.
